S eptember first is called International Youth Day in Soviet Russia. It was on that day that I arrived in Moscow to begin my six months’ study of the theatre. Moscow is, on days of big celebrations like this Youth Day, a vast theatre in itself, and I arrived in the midst of preparations for one of its frequent spectacles. In the late afternoon I was taken on my first drive through its streets. The choruses were assembling in the outlying factory districts, ready to march with banners and songs to the great Red Square, the stage of this demonstration, where against the towering whitewashed brick walls of the Kremlin, their audience—including Joseph Stalin—would witness the performance and greet the participants. It is astonishing to eyes used to parti-colored displays to discover the exciting effect of great masses of solid color. Everywhere was red, only red—flags of red, streamers of red, buildings draped in red. Against the background of such decorated streets, the slowly advancing lines moved toward the Square.
The performance was to begin at seven o’clock. Its routine consisted in the youth of Moscow marching past their leaders, several hundred thousand strong, in their massing afterward within earshot of the giant loudspeakers which would amplify the staccato phrases of Comrade Stalin speaking from the rampart of Lenin’s tomb. Seven o’clock found me on the way to the Opera, to the first perform-
ance of the International Theatre Festival which I was using as a kind of quick introduction to Moscow’s theatres. The car had to be abandoned halfway to the theatre because many streets were closed to traffic that evening. As I threaded my way through the lines of young people waiting to move to the Red Square, I felt that there, all about me, was real theatre. In one street the crowd was singing in lusty unison; at a corner three boys were dancing a peasant dance while the group around clapped hands to keep time for them. "The Russian is infected with a passion for spectacles,” wrote Stanislavski. He was talking of the stage, but there in the streets, before I had entered a single theatre, I felt that passion. I should have liked to stay on with the crowd, to march with them to the Red Square and watch them stage their mighty show, but I had come to see the other kind of spectacle, so I went on to the Opera.
The faraway music of the bands and the tramping of distant feet echoed through the classic portico as I entered what is one of the handsomest grand opera houses of Europe. Inside, the elegance of Russia’s Empire style remains untouched—the white and gold rococo decorations, the crimson satin damask hangings, the crimson velvet chairs of the orchestra floor, all are still there. But there is a new curtain hanging in the vast proscenium and its all- over pattern of hammers and sickles and revolutionary dates reminds one that this is no longer the imperial opera —now it belongs to the proletariat.
The full orchestra played the rousing Internationale in stately tempo, the audience resumed its seats, the curtains parted, and the opening scene of "Prince Igor” was revealed. What a surprise! Here were colorful settings very much in the conventional operatic tradition but given a new vividness and warmth by this Moscow artist; here were gorgeous costumes and trappings, huge choruses
which filled the sixty-foot stage; the whirling Polovtsian dances I had nowhere seen more lavishly staged. The opera of the proletariat was a match in magnificence for any royal or plutocratic opera anywhere in the world! Outside the house, water-stained old Muscovite palaces and cathedrals might be crumbling in desuetude or striving to keep face through utilitarian service to the cause which had destroyed their creators, but within the theatre the splendor of barbaric Russia’s castles and churches, princes and slaves filled the eye with romance, pomp, and glitter.
It was the theatre, however, rather than the opera, which I had come these six thousand miles to see, and the next night was my introduction to it. The play was "Intervention” by a Soviet writer named Slavin and the theatre was the Vakhtangov Theatre. Plays begin in Moscow at seven-thirty and one must be prompt, for late-comers are not admitted to the auditorium until the first intermission. I had arrived in ample time and so had opportunity _- to study my surroundings. This was one of the most important theatres in Moscow, I had been told, but what a strange-looking place it was—no gilt, no—cherubs, no rococo details here; no velvet curtain, no upholstered seats, no carpets, no crystal chandeliers. Plain plastered tan walls were without relieving ornamentation of any sort. A mouse-colored heavy flannel curtain hung in the proscenium; a row of spotlights on a bar hung from the ceiling a few feet in front of the curtain without masking of any kind. The seats had no cushion padding, no upholstery. Like undertaker’s folding chairs, their wooden backs were set at the most uncomfortable angle possible. The thought that I must sit thus bolt upright for the four hours which I had been told Russian plays lasted, was disconcerting. "Certainly the theatre offers little to charm its audience here,” I reflected. I mistily thought of the red plush of the old Empire Theatre in New York and of
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the blue velvet of the theatre in Indianapolis where I saw plays during my childhood. That was what theatres should look like. The/should have glamour, they should take one away from humdrum life into some enchanting place where splendid things might happen. This theatre was matter-of-fact, hard, real. It could become at once a huge hospital ward or a laboratory if its chairs were exchanged for the proper fittings.
Having thus taken startled stock of my material surroundings, I surveyed my fellow spectators. They, too, were quite matter-of-fact looking. Most of them appeared to have come straight from their work—no, jewels, no soft satins, no smooth shirt fronts. I admitted that such costumes would have looked amiss in the coldly utilitarian auditorium, but they would have helped me to feel a little less strange. It seemed to me that every tenth person in the theatre was a soldier. I tried to remember when on Broadway I had seen privates or "gobs” in a legitimate theatre, but I could not. And how many boys and girls! The New York theatre is on the whole an adult theatre* Save at Christmas holiday times, our audiences are middle- aged audiences. Nightly in Moscow half the crowd seems to be under twenty-five. A bell rang twice through the foyers. There was a final surge of people entering. I looked about and scanned the balcony and the orchestra. Not a single empty seat! I was to go to the theatre ninety times in Russia, and not more than a dozen times was I to see a vacant chair.
The lights dimmed and the play began. Its story was set in the days of Allied Intervention during the Russian Revolution. Odessa, Black Sea port in the south of Russia, was busy with Bolshevik and counter-revolutionary intrigue during the hot summer days and nights of 1920. The opening scene, in a little park overlooking the quai, was electric with tension. In the harbor below were a few
Allied battleships, from the interior news of Red advances kept coming. The Russian theatre has a way of throwing you at once into the heart of its excitement, no slow build-up; we are in two seconds thrust into the midst of it all. The stage floor slopes upward away from the audience at almost a thirty degree angle. A strange effect that gives —the spectators seem to be hurled straight up into the action and the actors seem to be projected out into the audience. The effect is much as it is in a nightmare when the earth seems to rise up to meet you and then is suspended halfway. Against a deep dark blue sky the sharp scarlet, corn yellow, emerald green, and white of the park’s formal flower bed stand out in hard sunny relief. The sun scorches down on the populace scurrying nervously about, stopping one another to ask for latest news, scanning the sea’s horizon. What a populace! This is no theatrical mob scene. In fact, it is no mob scene at all. There are only a dozen people moving. Each one is a vivid personality—soldiers in white uniforms, shop girls, grand ladies with stupid escorts, young students, each one a definite individual. None of them seems to look like an ordinary person, yet all seem to be very real. Again one is reminded of a nightmare. Men with long noses have very long noses, women with large hats have very large hats, thin men are very thin, fat ladies are very fat. They are a little like characters of a Peter Arno album come to life. They are all real types but exaggerated and caricatured to become something more than single individuals. They speak with sharp, biting rapidity; everyone is obviously living at high nervous tension—but that was the kind of days they were.
The opening scene is short. It stops with a jerk. The curtains close. But there is no pause. From entrances beside the proscenium the characters enter onto a forestage and continue the action. Perhaps it is a street, it does not
matter. The point is to keep things moving. No time to draw a breath. Now another full stage scene. The plot begins to unfold. There are a group of Reds carrying on undercover work in this seaport town. The hero—if there is a single hero, which there isn’t; there are half a dozen of them—seems to be tutor of the son of a rich bourgeoises She is conniving with the Allied generals. The son, a good- for-nothing, tries to sell information to whomever will pay a good price. Eventually he betrays his tutor into the hands of the Whites.
The action continues in short staccato scenes jumping about through Odessa: to the docks, to the headquarters of the White army, to the tutor’s study, to the park again, to the warehouses of the merchant woman, to the laundry shop where in a back room the Commissars meet their agents while ironing girls in the front shop sing two songs —one to warn of strangers’ approach, one to tell of the arrival of friends. Never in the theatre have I heard music used to create such excitement and suspense as do those two monotonous little themes. Music, incidentally, carries through much of the performance and always it increases the tension. Most excitingly staged is the scene in an outdoor cafe where the tutor is tracked down by White soldiers and caught as he sits at a little table. There are a dozen such tables on a terrace which seems to hang at the edge of space—there is only the deep night sky beyond. The quiet crowd of seaport folk at the tables watches exhibition dancing on the little stage at one end of the terrace. But the audience cannot watch the dance; it can only keep its eyes fixed on the little table in the corner where the tutor sits behind a newspaper. It feels the imminent danger, the most remarkable communication of intangible fear I have ever seen in the theatre. I try to force my eyes to wander over the scene and take in the moving couples and figures, to watch the waiters come
and go, but I can only sit transfixed, waiting for the end. It comes.
The play moves on to the prison cell where the tutor and two other captured Red companions are confined; then on to a drug store where the traitorous pupil is shot as he runs out into a thunderstorm; on to the side of an Allied transport ship where all the populace assembles to seek escape from the advancing Reds ;\ on to the final scene where three of the Interventionist soldiers, forsaking their comrades, are shown ascending the great steps of Odessa to join the Bolsheviks and replace, in number at least, the three comrades who had been executed—the tutor and his two friends.
With three pauses for breath, which is all the intermissions seem to be, the play has swept through to its end. The auditorium’s bleakness has been forgotten because the stage has been so alive. A decorated, soft interior would have hurt the atmosphere of this kind of drama. This is living stuff. We have all, the Russians and I, forgotten the hardness of the wooden chairs, fqrgotten the stiff backs. We have been sitting only on the very edges of our seats for four hours. Now that the performance is over, the enthusiasm of the crowd is unleashed. They stamp and cheer. The play has been in the repertory for a year, I am told, but the ovation is like an opening night’s. Every performance in the theatre in Russia seems like a "first night.” v There is the same electric excitement in the air time after time.
When I went home that evening, although still hot with excitement, I tried to think soberly about the performance and to catalogue my impressions. First of all, I was sure that this was one of the theatres about which I wished to know more. The Vakhtangov Theatre’s bright, vivid style attracted me tremendously. Here was the substance of reality but with an added outward form which made it
more than a mirror of life. There was nothing abstract about these people and this action, and yet there was a theatricality which made everything seem intensified to a point where it became almost unreal. Certainly I had never seen theatre like this. I must discover what they were driving at and how they accomplished these startling effects.
Then I considered the play. It was not a very well written play, I was sure of that, although my Russian was still pretty sketchy. There was far too much complication and confusion in its development. There was also a great deal of hokum and melodrama, I knew, and there was a great deal of what we should call the elements of propaganda. All these things I had been brought up to disapprove of in the theatre. Why was it that their presence here did not offend me, that instead it excited me? I decided that the melodrama was so good because it was real, that the propaganda did not seem to be such because it was simply the portrayal of actual history.
Two days later I entered for the first time the Moscow Art Theatre, a spot sacred and awesome to the man of the theatre, for it is the home of the greatest dramatic organization of this century. It is a quiet and distinguished place. The audience seems to talk in lower tones here; their hair is combed more carefully. Their shirts are cleaner than in other theatres. They seem to share the foreigner’s respect for the ground they tread. There is carpeting on the floors here and softer lights. The walls are a dull gray green and the woodwork is dark oak. There is little decoration save in the promenade foyer where photographs of their great men and scenes hang on the walls in dignified array. The seats are unupholstered here, too, but after the experience at the Vakhtangov Theatre, I am prepared to forget their existence altogether. The curtain with its famous sea-gull,
the device of the Art Theatre, taken from Chekhov’s play, “The Sea-Gull,” parts, and the play, “The Days of the Turbins,” begins.
This is a play dealing with the same period and events as “Intervention,” but what a difference! The performance begins quietly in a gentle drawing room with violet-tinted walls and white woodwork. It is evening and the curtains are drawn in the windows. The lovely pieces of Russian Empire mahogany glow softly. There are quiet and intimacy. The Turbin family, two brothers in the White Russian army, and their sister, are gathered for an evening at home. A country cousin, an amusing gawky lummox, and another White Guard officer, the sister’s lover, join the group. There is a supper, cheerful talk, some drinking and an argument. The scene which began so quietly mounts naturally to an exciting end, though how, it would be hard to describe, for there is nothing apparent about it. It seems to flow from within itself without a break. Actors talk to one another in the tones of normal conversation. Their entrances and exits are not stage “business”; they are simple comings and goings. When they sing the old Russian national anthem, grouped around the piano, it seems the most obvious and natural thing to do, nothing “stagey” at all. On this stage no actor is better than any other; there is complete give and take. One finds oneself interested in the family, in the whole group of people, not in each character separately.
The story of the play is complicated, particularly to a foreigner not conversant with the intricacies of the counter-revolution of the 1920’s. That two wings of the White army opposed each other while both were opposing the Reds is confusing, but it is the activities of these two White forces that form the plot of the central part of the play. There is a scene in the general army headquarters of the Ukraine which shows the desertion of the White com-
mander into the protecting arms of the Germans when the Reds press close; there is a scene in a trench hut where the ragged, hairy, common troops campaign in cold, dreary bitterness—a striking contrast to the red and gold elegance of headquarters.
There is a magnificent scene in the huge stair hall of a deserted schoolhouse where the White soldiers, told of the treachery of their general, are ordered to disband by their colonel, eldest of the Turbin brothers. They refuse, and demand that they be allowed to continue to fight for their tsar—a striking situation to find in a Bolshevik play. At the top of a long sweeping staircase, rising directly away from the audience, Alexei Turbin stands with drawn revolver facing the angry young cadets, thirty or forty of them filling the stair and the hall below. All we see of them are the backs of their long dark blue coats and an occasional head turned in profile, but we feel their surging movement up the stairs, their check, irresolution, change of mind, their renewed determination, their final defeat, all visible in the backs of their heads and the set of their shoulders as they listen to Alexei’s sharp incisive phrases while he paces the landing above their heads. This scene is highly dramatic, it is of the essence of the theatre, and yet one feels that it is not theatrical. The excitement is real. One is oneself standing on the stairs. The cannonade that announces the arrival of the Red army in the city seems no stage effect, and when a detachment of Reds enters the hall and Alexei is shot as he stands alone on the stairs, one is overcome by that helpless feeling that one should be doing something to assist and cannot.
The play ends in the quiet key in which it began. The younger brother, wounded too, but not fatally, is carried home unconscious. The tragic news of Alexei’s death is told in a simple and profoundly moving scene. There is no stage grief, the sorrow here is real. These are no actors
intervention. Designed by Rabinovich for the Vakhtangov Theatre
pickwick club. Two scenes Theatre
designed by Williams for the Moscow Art
playing a scene; the people in this violet room have lost a dear companion. On the play moves to a final scene. It is Christmas Eve and enough months have passed for the room and its inhabitants to have taken on their usual appearances again. While the country cousin helps Elena to decorate the simple Christmas tree, the Red army advances into the town. Its approach is merely felt within this room. When at the end of the play the bands of the victorious invading troops are heard playing in the distant street, and the Turbins stand quietly at the window listening to the strains of music that heralds a new order and a new day, we know that life for them is over and it seems a hard thing.
When this play was first produced about eight years ago, it was promptly banned, for, as one can appreciate, its picture of the hated White Russians was a little too sympathetic to please hardened Red hearts. But after five or six years it was allowed to reappear and has ever since been one of the most popular plays in Moscow. The reader may draw his own conclusions as to the meaning of this change of attitude.
This performance at the Moscow Art Theatre was not the shock to me that the Vakhtangov’s had been, because I was more prepared for it and more accustomed to the style which is the basis of most of our own. Except for the big scene on the stairs, there was little that was highly spectacular in the production. Its greatness lay in the consummately artistic use of the material offered by the playwright and by the actors; in the elevation of the very nonspectacular to the highest reaches of drama; above all, in the living, breathing reality which was so completely recreated. All the things that I had expected of the theatre of Stanislavski were there. But in the next performance . which I saw at the Art Theatre and in still another one
later, things I had not expected were exhibited and I was given new revelation of this great theatre’s work.
Three days after I saw "The Days of the Turbins,” I returned to see "The Marriage of Figaro.” Here was theatre of a completely different order. Here was fantasy, lightness, music, dancing. The settings of Golovin established at once the spirit of the performance. His major color scheme was bright orange and cerise. Visualize that combination of colors and you know what the production was like. I call to mind enchanting rococo swirls and curves, little gilt chairs, vividly striped walls, high powdered coiffures decked with bright feathers, little swinging iron-railinged stairways up and down which scampered hoop-skirted chambermaids pursued by amorous periwigged valets, and a final scene in a fabulous garden with at least a dozen little rococo summerhouses, and everywhere boxwood hedging, in and out of which popped the cerise and orange and emerald-green figures, moonlight over all, tiny Chinese lanterns strung all about through the hedges, and a finale in which the entire stage started to go round and round in time to tinkling music.
This was indeed a revelation. A theatre that could play with such simple dignity the moving story of the last days of White Russia on one night and on the next serve up such delectable fantasy which seemed to have no connection with the temper or the manner of the theatre of real life, must be studied. Although the style was so different, there were things that carried through from the other Art Theatre production I had seen: the ensemble acting was the same—all characters seemed to be equally important, equally interesting and equally well-played. The fantasy seemed to be real fantasy, if that paradox conveys something. What that connection was I determined to find out.
My determination was strengthened by their "Pickwick Club,” a dramatization of the Dickens book. I went to
the theatre a little skeptical. How could a Russian theatre, especially one as intensely Russian as the Moscow Art itself, bring to life characters as intensely English as Dickens’? I need have had no qualms. This theatre became for those few hours nineteenth century England. The Mr. Pickwick was the Mr. Pickwick one has always imagined. Sam Weller and all the others were made completely, vividly alive. They were not story-book characters, they were people with the most astonishing set of idiosyncrasies imaginable, wearing the most startling pink waistcoats and striped trousers, but still quite real. The settings were vividly alive too—real and yet highly theatrical, a great surprise in the Moscow Art Theatre. The first scene consisted simply of a backdrop, in the center of which was painted a huge mirror and in the painted mirror was the painted reflection of all the rest of the room—the other walls, the window, the sunlight pouring in, the tables and chairs. None of this scenery was actually on the stage. All of it was shown to us in this mirror. In a later scene when Mr. Pickwick was in jail, the scenery suggested a Thomas Benton mural. Again there was but a painted backdrop, the great barred entrance, beside it a stairs and above it a gallery, and then—what was remarkable—the place was peopled with figures, painted on the stairs, on the gallery, all over the place! All the rest of the world has been saying for twenty years that you should not combine two- dimensional scenery and three-dimensional actors, is still saying it. It was a lesson which the world learned partly from this Art Theatre itself, and here in 1934 was that same Art Theatre, sanctum of realism, painting tables and chairs on its drops and mixing up painted figures and flesh and blood people on the same stage!
These three plays were not, of course, the only plays I saw at the Moscow Art Theatre. There was the unforgettable performance of Gorki’s “The Lower Depths,”
after seeing which I felt certain that the soul of the theatre is words and acting. These actors, Kachalov, Tarkhanov, and the rest might have played their play in an empty barn and I would, I am sure, have been just as moved to laughter and to tears. Lights, scenery, and costumes passed unnoticed beside the power of these people who could make you laugh one minute and cry the next by the simple movement of a hand or the tone of a voice. There was "The Cherry Orchard” which I saw twice, the second time at the gala performance on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Chekhov’s birth, when Knipper-Chekhova, the playwright’s widow, played Madame Ranevskaya, and as many of the other actors as still remain played their original roles. There were a dozen other plays which I saw at the Art Theatre, all of them memorable performances.
The reader must realize that the Art Theatre, like all the other theatres in Moscow, performs according to the repertory system. That means that each theatre has anywhere from four to fifteen different plays which it is prepared to perform in rotation, a new play each evening. In America we know this system only through its application in the grand opera and in a few Shakespearean companies, Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre a few years ago, and in one or two other isolated professional and semi-professional theatres. To the artists, this system is of great value, for it keeps them from ever getting into that rut into which constant performance of the same play night after night for months forces our actors. They approach each performance fresh and alert. The theatre keeps itself flexible and the public has much more to choose from. For the foreign theatre student it is a grand system, for it enables him to see for himself how the style of each theatre has evolved. I could see, for instance, "The Lower Depths” as it was played in 1902, "The Marriage of Figaro,” created in 1927, and "Pickwick Club” just finished.
It is as though the Theatre Guild were to continue to play from time to time "The Goat Song,” "Caesar and Cleopatra,” "The Doctor’s Dilemma,” "Reunion in Vienna,” "R.U.R.,” and "Strange Interlude,” for instance, side by side with their new "Taming of the Shrew” and "Porgy and Bess.” To do this, of course, they would have to have a permanent acting company and an exceedingly flexible acting company, and that is what each Moscow theatre has.
There are some forty professional theatres in Moscow and by that I mean much more than forty playhouses. I mean forty groups of actors and actresses, directors, technical, literary, and administrative staffs who work together not only from play to play, not only for a season, but for years. That is why I felt some hidden connection between a performance of "The Days of the Turbins” and "The Cherry Orchard” produced more than twenty years before. That is why after seeing "Intervention” at the Vakhtangov, I was prepared for the brightness and theatricality of "Princess Turandot” or "Love and Intrigue” at the same theatre. Each theatre seemed to have a language especially its own. Every production was played in that language and all its actors seemed to know it and speak it. They could do this only because they had been talking it together for a long time.
From that week of the International Theatre Festival another evening stands out. It was the evening of my first visit to the Meierhold Theatre. Meierhold, I had always been told, was the leader of the Revolutionary Theatre. His name was coupled with the photographs I had seen of strange constructivist scenery—the stage filled with ladders and platforms, ramps and slides and bare scaffoldings. I was curious to see what was meant by this, for when I had seen it tried in America, I had felt that neither audience
nor many of the artists had had any idea what it meant. I was not, however, to find out that evening, for the play which Meierhold had elected to present to the Theatre Festival was his latest, "La Dame aux Camelias.” While it was certainly a different sort of theatrical experience from any of the others I had had in Moscow, it was far from being the revolutionary revelation I had expected.
I entered a theatre which looked at first glance like any other in Moscow until I turned to the stage. Then I saw that there was no curtain hanging in the proscenium and the unlighted set was standing in place. Unmasked spotlights stood on platforms in various parts of the auditorium. Suddenly there was a crash on a huge gong and the lights flashed out—another crash and the stage lights snapped up and the play began. The shock with which the performance got under way was so different from the gentle easing into action which I was used to, slowly dimming lights, if any sound that of fake church bells or dinner chimes, that I was at once startled into attention. That was the intended effect, I suppose. But where was the constructivist scenery? To my untutored eye this looked like an unfinished high school production. Across half the stage hung a pale blue flannel curtain on a wire; it stretched diagonally from the lower right hand corner where the proscenium should have begun and did not. This curtain was about twelve feet high and above and behind it were visible the tops of other pieces of scenery and the railing of a staircase. On the opposite side of the stage was a piece of solid wall with a French window in it. It stood in space; that is to say, it had no connecting wall on either side of it, there was no ceiling above it. Instead of the ramps and scaffolds, there was a huge grand piano, Louis XV and XVI chairs, rugs, gilt candelabra, fine stuffs strewn about the stage. As I made this examination the performance was proceeding. The cast was dressed in fine
stuffs as well; there were many jewels. Music played intermittently. All this was far from creating a realistic illusion—there could be no doubt that this was complete theatricality—but the surprise at finding Meierhold using actual things, actual windows and doors and fireplaces at all, was so great that I failed to appreciate just what he was doing with them.
I need not tell the familiar story of Camille. All I need to remark upon is that the whole thing was played in a sharp staccato key, which is the one way, I am sure, it should not be done. Characters jumped and bounced about the stage with disconcerting vigor. Actors kept making entrances from the side doors of the auditorium whence they climbed up on to the stage. When the act was ended there was a blackout, then the house lights came up. Those who did not go out to promenade saw the crew come out on to the set, sweep the stage, rearrange the properties, prepare for the next scene. Never for a moment either before, during or between and after the action was one allowed to forget that he was in the theatre. There was no effort made to re-create an illusion. Meierhold is unalterably opposed to that. That is one reason, I believe, why "La Dame aux Camelias” was an unfortunate choice for his theatre. There were, however, many superb moments in the production, effects of startling beauty. These were chiefly based on compositional arrangements of movement and pose. It would be a far cry, perhaps, to liken the gambling scene to an Italian fresco, but the same flowing rhythm locking the figures together and carrying the eye in swinging movement up to the stairs and back again, is apparent in the Meierhold staging. Movement was the challenging thing in this theatre, and it was to find out how this movement was created that I was anxious to make further study of Meierhold’s work.
Before I did so, however, I returned to see other per-
formances of his. Cromelynck’s comedy, "The Magnificent Cuckold,” was more the sort of production I had expected of Meierhold. Again, when I entered the theatre it was to find no curtain. But the stage presented a different picture this time. The brick back wall of the stage formed the background. In front of it on the bare stage was an arrangement of platforms whose scaffoldings were completely unmasked. The bare boards and cross bracings were all visible to the audience. There were ladders and slides and three wheels of different sizes hanging above the highest platform which were later to revolve, apparently at will. There was no furniture on the stage, nothing that looked like anything! It appeared to be a structural representation of the thriller equipment of Coney Island stripped of its painted externals. There was a fairly large cast; everyone in it was dressed alike in blue jumpers. It looked as though a group of airplane mechanics or gas station attendants had gathered together to put on a play. The plot is the old triangle situation, a man, his wife and her lover, given by Meierhold what they call in Russia "social meaning.” This is apparently accomplished by the introduction of acrobatics. The cast races and tumbles about the stage, turns somersaults and cartwheels—and all for a purpose. I can suggest this purpose by describing the entrance of the lover. At another theatre there would be a knock at the door, the man would enter, see the object of his affection, move toward her with eager steps, smile and take her in his arms. They would both "register” joy at the meeting. Meierhold places the lady at the foot of a tin slide, the lover climbs up a ladder to the top of the slide, zooms down it, feet first, knocks the lady off onto the floor, and shouts something that sounds like Russian for "Wheel” Thus does Meierhold express the effect of an eager lover meeting his mistress. The spirit of the scene is established directly by this completely abstract action. Of
course, Meierhold knows that lovers don’t enter down slides in real life, but he believes—or did twelve years ago when he produced this—that the emotion of abandonment and joy with which the man is filled can much more accurately be revealed if he slides down a ten-foot S curve to meet his lady than if he follows the dictates of natural movement. When this is understood, there is some meaning to Meierhold’s work. When other things are understood, there is still more meaning to it. I decided that apart from the fact of the historical importance of the Meier- hold Theatre as the mainspring of the revolutionary stage in Russia, I wanted to study his work in order to appreciate better his finished productions which I would see.
It was after the Theatre Festival was over that the Realistic Theatre opened its season. I went to its opening night to see a play called "The Iron Flood.” The Realistic Theatre is also called the Krasnaya Presnaya Theatre in Moscow, named for the district of the city in which it is situated. It is a young theatre, it is experimental, its style is not yet definitely set, it is a theatre for a predominately worker audience, there is nothing like it in Moscow. All this I was told before I went. It sounded as though it would make a good fourth theatre in which to concentrate my study, for I wanted one to represent the young revolutionary studios. (I had already decided to study the methods of the Moscow Art Theatre, Meierhold’s and the Vakhtangov theatres.)
That night was one of the most exciting I spent in Moscow. When I arrived in the little building which houses Okhlopkov and his company, I found the doors of the auditorium not yet open. The audience was standing in the foyer. I assumed that since this was the opening night, something had gone wrong within the theatre. Finally, when all the audience had arrived and was restlessly mov-
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ing about in the foyer, we were startled by a couple of people who burst open a door of the auditorium from within with a shout, dashed out through the crowd and disappeared. At the same time the other doors were flung open and the audience entered the auditorium. But was it the auditorium or was it the stage? There was no curtain, no proscenium, no stage at all. Opposite the entrance doors a long mound stretched. From behind it a blue dome of sky rose, swept overhead and down behind where I stood near the doorway. One end of this raised hillside was screened with bushes; the other end sloped down with rocky incline toward the door from which the two people had emerged into the lobby. Along two sides of the mound were chairs and into them the bewildered audience found its way.
The hillside was filled with people making preparations for a camp fire. The two who had run through the crowd had been off with a jug to get water. The whole place was in the half-light that precedes night. It was impossible to read a program in such light, but there was no desire to, for I was too busy accustoming myself to the situation. Was I sitting on the stage with these actors, or were they in the auditorium with me? The half-light became less around me, the light on the hillside increased, the action, which had already been going on, became coherent and the play itself began. There was little to it. This, it seemed, was an advance detachment of the Red army which we had joined, an army of men, women and children, engaged in the Bolshevik Civil War. They were cut off from the rest of the Reds and were about to face a wing of the Whites. Their preparations for camp, for attack and defense, the battle and their final victory, snatched from impending defeat with the aid of the regular Red troops who arrived at the crucial moment, were the stuff out of which the play was made, nothing more. That
evening we spent four hours with the Red army in the field—that was all; but what an experience! Imagine coming in off a quiet street and finding oneself in a pitched battle. The harrowing excitement of the film "All Quiet on the Western Front” had this to relieve it, that the audience was looking on from seats a hundred feet away from the screen on which the action was pictured; one could look from it to the reassuring red twinkle of the exit lights and remember that one was really in a building on Broadway. But here the action was all around you. The wounded dragged themselves across your feet, the people were cheering each other on beside you, the relieving troops you could hear coming behind you and sweeping over you, above your head the night sky hung. A racking experience that, and one I do not recommend to theatre-goers who want only to be amused. I came out trembling on the surface and profoundly moved within. Here was theatre that was life. And if it was to me, how much more so to the rest of the audience, to men and women who had themselves slept on a rocky slope with one arm under a loved one’s head and the other clutching a machine gun, to people who had themselves gone through the agony of those days.
That night I understood what the Marxists had been driving at in their "interpretation of art.” This was an exaggerated example, no doubt, but it made their point more real. Art, they had said, must be part of life, it must reflect the struggle that is going on in life, a struggle based on class aligned against class. Art cannot exist for its own sake; art as escape is impossible; ivory towers are impossible. The individual artist cannot look upon his creation as the expression of his own individual emotions; he cannot become absorbed in his personal relationship to a dish of grapes or a plate of dead fish. He must use his art to convey some meaning to the beholder. His music, his paint-
ing, his verse, his theatre, must have meaning for the people, must concern itself with them and their problems. In Russia the people are everything. "Art must belong to the people,” said Lenin. It does.
The excitement of these half dozen performances which I have described I experienced often again both in these four theatres and in many others. I remember, for instance, the first production which I saw at the Kamerny Theatre of Tairov. It was of a Soviet play called "The Optimistic Tragedy” by Vishnevski. The inside of the Kamerny Peter Fleming has described as looking like the inside of the turret of a battleship. With its flat unrelieved gray walls, its two upper boxes which look like observation posts, its proscenium which curves concavely away from the audience and in which a gray steel fire-curtain opens heavily sideways to reveal another gray flannel curtain hanging within, that is exactly what it does resemble. It made an ideal setting for "The Optimistic Tragedy,” a play about the conversion of the Russian navy to the side of the Bolsheviks in 1918. Two sailors flanking the proscenium addressed the audience directly in excited tones before the play and in the intervals between scenes. They were a sort of combined commentator and exhorter. The stage was set in a stylized abstraction of an arena of battle. Low architectonic forms in gray were massed against a dark gray-blue sky across which at times scudded darker gray clouds, against which at other times was the silhouette of barbed wire pickets. Without much change it was now the deck of a cruiser, now a battlefield. Soldiers in dark blue lined themselves against each other, some supporting, some opposing the single woman Commissar who commanded the field. Superb lighting and staging and movement of masses of people were the things that gripped me in this performance—all of these aesthetic reactions,
you note. The acting was not great and I was little moved beyond the sensuous satisfaction derived from a well- mounted production. That continued to be my reaction to this theatre after I had seen other plays—its surface technique was excellent, beneath that there was little.
I could fill this volume with descriptions of play after play which I saw in Moscow. I could tell about the rollicking but exquisite performance of ''Twelfth Night” at the Second Moscow Art Theatre, done against a sepia drop of an Italian hill town, among a forest of slender gold Renaissance columns and arcades; about plays done in Yiddish at the Jewish Theatre, or in Gypsy at the Gypsy Theatre. I have described mostly Revolutionary history plays, but there are many other kinds, and I could describe farces like "Strange Child” at the Satire Theatre, or plays about problems of contemporary Soviet life like "My Friend” at the Theatre of the Revolution, or old Russian classics, Ostrovski at the Maly Theatre, Chekhov, Tolstoy at the Moscow Art, classics which continue to draw great crowds. I could make this book a series of descriptions of exciting evenings in Moscow theatres, but that is not what I want to do, for I myself was really more interested in what went on by day in these theatres, how these various breath-taking effects were being conceived, how these artists were working at creation. I wanted to find out what it was like to work under almost ideal conditions, in a place where there was no commercialism in the theatre, where the state was supporting all losses, where the stage was free to set the standards of culture as well as to reflect them. Here the stage could lift the people to it, not sink to them, for it need keep no eye on its box office. Here it had an audience which flocked to its doors—it seemed almost as though the theatre were to the Russian people what sport is to America.
With performances by night of plays like these I have
described, and operas, ballets, cinema; with rehearsals by day in half a dozen theatres watching something created out of nothing; with conversations with great artists explaining why they were doing the things I saw them do, the six months were filled. They swept by like a single week and scarcely before I had time to draw a long breath, I found myself on a ship looking back over the Black Sea at the receding coast of Russia. I am a theatre craftsman, not a dramatic critic. I am interested in means quite as much as in ends, and the methods of the Russian stage are as exciting as its results. In Moscow people in the theatre are not working through trial and error, by intuition. They know what they are trying to do. They seek consciously to perfect their art. That is why study of their processes of work is so envisioning, why it becomes the key to an understanding of the finished products as well as of the greatness of the theatre itself. There are other keys. They will come afterwards. First, let us examine the way these theatres work.
CHAPTER TWO
T he demand for actors and theatre workers exceeds the supply.”
I was sitting in a large handsomely furnished room in what was no doubt once a merchant prince’s mansion on a quiet side street in Moscow. In its merchant prince days, however, the room probably had no large flat-topped mahogany desk such as the one across which I was facing Tovarishch Furminova; it certainly had no Tovarishch Furminova. She is the director of the Technicum of the Central Theatre Combinate, a large and powerful woman with a gentle smile and a grace of manner which belies the severity of her black dress and her sizeable desk. She is a famous figure aside from her position in the school, for she is the widow of Commissar Furminov who worked with and has recorded the career of Chapayev, both of them heroes of the early days of the Revolution. It was she who made this significant statement.
"The demand for actors and theatre workers exceeds the supply.” Surprising news that is to one coming from the New York theatre of today. In America young people are urged to enter any profession other than the theatre, which they are told has room for no one unless he is outstandingly able; even then he may have to walk the streets and the casting offices for several years before he is allowed to prove that he is. For three years I myself tried to be allowed to show New York that I could design scenery,
27
but the union which controls that branch of art refused me admittance simply because the supply exceeded the demand. And now Furminova was saying, "The demand exceeds the supply.” If I do not use that statement as the text of a book (and I very well could, for in those words is summarized one of the great forces affecting the theatre in Russia today—there is a demand for it), I can at least use it as the text of this chapter. It is the way in which the theatre meets this demand for more actors and artists about which I wish to talk—the way it makes more actors.
An American man of the theatre one day remarked to me, "I go to Moscow after three or four years’ absence and find scores of young actors who were not in the theatre before, but who play with a maturity which suggests that they’ve been acting' for at least ten years. See if you can find out when you are in Moscow where they come from and how they are trained so rapidly.”
The Russians are famous for their training of dancers. The praises of the ballet schools of Moscow and St. Petersburg have been sung for years and everyone knows that the Russians take their future "prima ballerina assoluta” at the tender age of seven or eight, subject her to the most rigorous training and give her the most meticulous care for a good ten years before they consider her ready to toe her way into the spotlight. It would be surprising if equal attention were not paid to the training of artists for the dramatic theatre, since it also occupies such a distinguished position among the arts of Russia. The attention is comparable but its methods are less spectacular, for the emphasis is placed not on the small child but on the older young person, as it must be, the training being not so much physical as intellectual.
The preparation of actors and other craftsmen and artists of the stage is effected in Moscow through two formal channels and in one rather indirect fashion. First,
the iron flood. Staged by Okhlopkov at the Realistic Theatre
Socialistic realism at Okhlopkov
the Realistic Theatre! aristocrats staged by
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there are the schools, or "technicums,” as they are called, which are associated directly with individual theatres. There were about eight of these in 1934. Each theatre controls and administers its own, absorbs the graduates into its permanent company, and is thus able to extend its work because of the increased number of members at its disposal. The Maly, Kamerny, Vakhtangov, Meierhold, Second Moscow Art, Gypsy, Jewish and Revolutionary theatres all had technicums in operation while I was in Moscow. Secondly, there are the schools of the theatre organized and administered under the direct supervision of the People’s Commissariat of Education. In Moscow only one such existed in 1934 and it was the Central Theatre Combinate, an amalgamation, as the name implies, of two schools, the State Theatre Technicum and the State Theatre Institute. The third training field, a feeding ground to some extent for the other two, is the theatrical collectives within the factories and collective farms. All of these latter are amateur and none of them exist for the direct purpose of helping the professional theatre create new actors as do the technicums and the Combinate, but it happens that the regular theatre schools draw many of their students from these collectives.
2
The widespread desire to participate in the theatre, either as a spectator or as, in almost any humble way, a performer, which is testimony to the Russian’s talent for and his love of the theatre, accounts, I suppose, for the fact that almost every large factory and farm has its dramatic circle with a regular program of work.
It was during the first year of the First Five Year Plan that the "Agit Brigades,” as they were then called, came into being. "Agit” is an abbreviation for "agitational” and
their purpose during this early period in the drive for rehabilitation was to present through various means criticism of current problems and to engender enthusiasm for the tasks at hand. It was really a two-fold purpose which they had: dramatic expression and propaganda, and of the two I suspect that the latter was uppermost in the minds of the participants. Their material was crude and topical, more animated posters than anything else, and little attention was paid to form. One factory group produced twelve plays in a single year. Under such circumstances they had very little connection with the art of the theatre except as an expression of the primitive urge to present ideas more clearly through dramatic representation.
In 1932 an Olympiad of these "agitational” groups was held. After it, a decree was issued by the government demanding that they give more attention to artistic principles. It is interesting that this came at the same time that the professional theatres were being told by the government that they might exercise more self-determination, and a general lessening of the propaganda element in art was being felt. Out of the "Agit Brigades” developed dramatic circles which paid more attention to their actor members than to the dramatization of social slogans. Instead of a dozen plays, only four or five, but of better quality, were produced a year. Emphasis was placed upon technique of speech, movement, study of the history of the theatre, and upon raising the cultural level of these groups. To assist in this work came instructors who were actors in the various theatres, the Moscow Art, the Vakhtangov, and the others. Factory laborers in Moscow were, and are, being made familiar with the working ideas of the great theatres. Imagine the union of locomotive engineers in this country organizing a dramatic club where the members in their spare time discuss the methods of the Theatre Guild as opposed to the Group Theatre!
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Not every laborer, of course, participates in this work as a performer. Probably not more than six per cent of the workers in a factory are active in its dramatic circle, and most of them are younger workers. They work in the factory until three-thirty or four o’clock, then in the evenings they go to their club where the dramatic circle has its own room or, in some cases, even a stage. Here about twenty evenings are spent in rehearsals under the direction of a professional actor. If the production is particularly good, it is given in one of the larger clubs and at several performances, even perhaps going on a little tour through the districts of Moscow.
In 1934 a second Olympiad was held and a number of the "agitational” groups represented showed marked improvement. Until this last year the repertoires of these groups were chiefly composed of club plays, written for amateur consumption, and they probably did not get very far from a rather infantile projection of social propaganda. But now these groups are producing many of the same plays as the big theatres, and classical dramas find a place along with Soviet ones. Moliere seems to be popular with these amateur groups who are not, I am relieved to report, encouraged to tackle Shakespeare. Two modern plays and one classic in each year’s program is the repertoire of the average "agitational” dramatic group.
I can best illustrate the tie between these collectives and the professional theatre by telling of a young man who was a member of the dramatic group in the great automobile factory at the edge of Moscow named after Stalin. He was very much interested in acting, and showed such capability that he was allowed to play the leading role in one of the group’s plays. The manager of the factory happened to attend—it may have been his custom, I don’t know—and he was tremendously impressed by the talent of the young mechanic-actor. The next day he telephoned
to the First Art Theatre. "I have here/’ he said, "a boy whose acting I think quite good. I wish you would send out someone from the Theatre to the next performance of the circle and see what you think of him. If you consider that he has real ability, I should like to have you take him as an apprentice to the Art Theatre. The factory will pay his expenses.” The Art Theatre sent one of its regis- seurs who agreed with the factory manager and the boy was accepted as an apprentice.
I like this story because it illustrates a situation so different from the one existing in America, and because it helps to answer the question which is so frequently asked: "But”—the question always begins with "but”—"but is there any chance for a person who shows talent? Don’t they all become standardized and mechanized and have to work in factories?” At every point the story shows how different is the approach to the theatre in Russia and America. First, how many factories in the United States have good dramatic clubs for their manual laborers (not the white-collar employees) ? Second, if such clubs existed, how much interest would the average business executive take in its activities and with how much critical judgment could he witness its work? Third, granting a good club and an artistically sensitive director, what theatre exists in New York which would be sympathetic to his suggestion that it send out a representative to Paterson or Hackensack, let us say, to consider a talented mechanic as a possible apprentice; in the fourth place, how many theatres in New York have permanent apprentice groups in which the young artist could become enrolled to learn more about his art? It is more common for casting directors to send young men back to factories (without offering to pay their expenses thereto), than it is to imagine the reverse procedure taking place in the United States.
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3
To get an idea of the training work which the large theatres of Moscow are doing, let us follow this young mechanic of ours through his career of the next four years. The Moscow Art Theatre, at which he has been accepted, has, at the present time, no formal technicum. It has preferred in recent years to accept three or four exceptionally promising young people into its organization each year, not to go through a regular course, but rather to come, through an assimilative process, to a knowledge of the Stanislavski system in theory and practice. These youngsters are thus thrown much more closely into contact with the actual production work of the theatre; all of them play from the outset at least walk-ons in three or four plays; they attend rehearsals and the practice classes which the members of the theatre company themselves continue to hold. Their training is as rigorous as that received in the larger and more organized schools of the other theatres, perhaps more so because, in view of the small number of apprentices, the work is more personally supervised. There is no set point in the Art Theatre’s plan at which the apprentice ceases to be one, and becomes a full-fledged member—no graduation exercises. The customary time of apprenticeship is from three to four years, but less talented young people may serve a longer period of trial before doing any real acting; a very able one may get a nice little part or two while still only a cub.
We should get a much better idea of Moscow theatre training if our mechanic had been sent to the Kamerny Theatre Technicum. This Technicum is the oldest in Moscow affiliated with an individual theatre. It has existed for eleven years and in the season of 1934-35 h had sixty-nine students. Our young worker, to have been admitted there.
would have had to submit to the entrance requirements of the Technicum along with the other one hundred and fifty or so who annually apply for admission. He would have to have received an elementary school training, and then he would have taken an examination in reading— dramatic reading, the early stages of it held as a sort of group contest. As the weeding-out process advanced, he would arrive at last at the point where his work would be judged by Tairov himself, and if the director of the theatre approved of him, he would be accepted. If it was in 1934 that he entered, he would have been one of the twenty- eight students who, accepted from the one hundred and fifty applicants, formed the first-year class. The ages of all of them were about eighteen.
His first year he spends only part of his day at the Technicum. Since he had been living in Moscow while working at the Stalin automobile plant, he doubtless already has a room and so would not be eligible for the dormitory which is provided to house the students who come from the collective farms or are accepted from cities or towns outside Moscow. He will probably continue, as a matter of fact, to do his work at the factory by day, for the work for first-year students is only part-time.
The early autumnal Russian twilight will find him on his way to the theatre, for at five o’clock his classes begin. Entering through the side door he climbs the stairs to the second floor above Tairov’s large "cabinet.” Here at the top of the theatre there are three or four bare whitewashed rooms, an office, some showerbaths. His first class this afternoon—the schedule varies each day—is dancing (ballet, not ballroom, of course), so donning his practice costume, a pair of trunks, he enters the practice room. For thirty minutes there will be work at the bar, then half an hour devoted to some elementary pas and tours . He works at this with such diligence that the casual visitor
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dropping into the room to see what goes on might well think that he had entered a regular ballet school. Just as the Russian maitres de ballet believe that their pupils should have a little dramatic training, so the directors of the theatre Technicum think it best for their actors to have a grounding in the ballet. Of course, the student cannot get very far in his ballet work (as a ballet master would be quick to assure him), since he only began it at eighteen, but a few hours a week at it should, after four years, give him flexibility of body and balance. A visit to a fourth- year dancing class and a comparison of its work with the
"freshmen’s” proves that. 410607
Our mechanic-turning-actor continues in classes each of an hour’s duration until about eleven o’clock, having had time-out in the early evening for supper which he would be given free in the theatre’s dining room. His class in dancing would not be his only exercise. He would have an hour (not these same courses every day) of what the curriculum lists as "gymnastics: rhythmics,” an hour of acrobatics and an hour of fencing. At the Kamerny Theatre probably a larger amount of time is spent in fitting the body for the stage than at most of the technicums, for Tairov’s system is synthetic and his actors must be able to execute whatever patterns of movement are the basis of the production. They must be able to dance and pantomime, if it is light opera which Tairov is next to mount. His famous musical show, "Girofle-Girofla,” requires the cast to perform enough circus antics to justify their course in acrobatics.
At the beginning of his second year, the student must give up his job as mechanic, for now the business of becoming an actor is going to occupy his entire day. He will now receive the small stipend which is granted to all students after their first year by the Narkompros (ab-
breviated title in Russian for the People’s Commissariat of Education, which I shall use hereafter to designate that department of the Soviet government). His work will have to improve as he continues in the Technicum, for there is a weeding-out during the four years, and by the time he enters the third year his class will be about half the size it was at entrance. In this third year he will be appearing in mob scenes in the larger productions, perhaps even in his second year he was drafted for this; in his fourth year he will understudy and play a few "bits.” Therefore much of the time in these last two years will be spent in actual rehearsal on the big stage.
During his four years he will have studied a great variety of subjects. Narkompros has made certain minimum requirements which all theatre technicums must meet, so that for the most part when we study the curriculum of the Kamerny Technicum we are also considering the curricula of all the other schools. The government places a great responsibility on its artists and it wishes them to be as well and as broadly educated as possible. The courses include Political Economy, History of Western Theatre, History of the Russian Theatre, the Russian Language, Russian Literature, Western Literature, Psychology, History of Art, History of the Methodology of the Kamerny Theatre; Voice Production, Choral Singing, Solo Singing; also Make-up, Stagecraft, all the Gymnastic-rhythmicdancing-acrobatic training I have described, and most important, of course, Mastery of Acting. The courses in history, literature, politics, economics and art are required by Narkompros , the relative attention paid to music and physical culture varies with each technicum, and the Mastery of Acting each theatre teaches in terms of its own system and the ideas of its creative leader. From the beginning every potential member of the company receives
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a grounding in the idiom and the style in which he will later create. It is this which helps to give each theatre its own internal common-ground of understanding of terminology and of aim.
For a clearer idea of this key course in Mastery of Acting, let us go to the Technicum of the Maly Theatre. Since mastery of acting is the basis of the Maly’s fame, we should learn more from this particular course there than elsewhere.
During the first year of the course not a word is spoken —all is in pantomime. This is one of the elements of the Stanislavski preparation. In fact, the Stanislavski system is the basis of training for the students at the Maly, as it is for most of the Moscow theatre technicums. In the second year, when the control of movement has been learned and the necessity for speech can no longer be restrained, but has developed directly and simply as a consequence of the movement, words are added. Almost at once the second-year student is plunged into Shakespeare and Moliere. He is not expected to grasp the subtleties of the roles, it is simply felt that when the time comes to use words, they might as well be grand ones, and the director of the Technicum believes that the characters of Shakespeare and Moliere are niore sharply drawn and clearly defined than characters in the Russian classics. Therefore, study of Ostrovski is postponed until the third year when the student works also with Ibsen and Hauptmann; then concentration on the psychology of the role is begun. In the fourth year the students work on two studio productions: one Russian and one foreign classic. Now they go back to Shakespeare, to Moliere or to another classic, and this time try to "incarnate” the role. In other words, whereas in their earlier study they had only occupied themselves with the words of the play and the external shape of the characters, now they delve into the
meaning of the drama and try to give psychological reality to the people of the play. 1
This seems to be pretty advanced work for young actors between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, twenty per cent of whom have been enrolled from collective farms where they have had only the sketchiest literary education—many of them almost illiterate. But it shows how Russia’s great classical theatre tackles the problem of preserving the classic tradition for the future generation and of creating actors who can work directly and intelligently with classic material. It also serves to show how the emphasis varies in different theatres. At the Maly it is mastery of the "mighty line” and familiarity with Shakespeare at the tenderest age possible, while at the Kamerny it is complete control and flexibility of the body.
If we go to the school of the Meierhold Theatre we shall see the same attention paid to physical development. It is not called a technicum there, for it does not offer the full curriculum required of an official technicum; it is more a large and organized group of apprentices. A great deal of the student’s time from his very first day is spent in actual rehearsals conducted by Meierhold personally. For reasons which I shall subsequently point out, this is particularly essential at the Meierhold Theatre. Every morning there is a class in "bio-mechanics.” This is the basic principle of Meierhold’s revolutionary work. The official definition of bio-mechanics formulated by one of Meierhold’s chief regisseurs, Korenyev, and approved by him, suggests that the term may be applied in connection with the preparation of the actor.
"Bio-mechanics ” writes Korenyev, "is the name given by Meierhold to a method of training actors elaborated
1 The further explanation of this, which is part of the Stanislavski system of acting, appears in the succeeding chapter.
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by Meier hold himself. The actor must acquire the necessary skill for his profession through a study of movements of people and animals.
"The subject of bio-mechanics is an attempt to find active laws for the actor’s movements within the frame of the stage . With this purpose in mind , Meier hold made experiments in drawing schemes for the movement and style of acting, its exact definition and regulation, taking into consideration all possible needs of the actor .
"The trained body, the well-functioning nervous system, correct reflexes, vivacity and exactness of reaction, the control of one’s body—in other words, the general feeling for space and time, and coordination of movements with each other—such are the results of the application of bio-mechanics. Such is, at the same time, the basic approach, which, together with a certain talent for music and a certain amount of intelligence, Meierhold asks from his actors.”
I spent an hour one morning watching the Meierhold apprentices at work. There are no classrooms in his theatre, for at this time he is occuping a renovated moving picture house until his own new building is finished, and space is at a premium. All classes are held in the lobby of the theatre where, behind a few screens, the twenty-five young men and women of the group were practicing. It was an exercise to music based on the movements of a boxing match, and the give and take, thrust and guard, had been carefully observed and set down in a formalized annotation. "The actor must acquire the necessary skill for his profession through a study of movements of people and animals.” When this exercise was completed after many repetitions, mattresses were brought out and the boys of the group practiced tumbling for another half-hour.
In addition to their work with bio-mechanics, I was in-
terested to learn that the students are required to study the Stanislavski system of acting. This, I think, is a surprise to people who know how bluntly Meierhold opposes the art of the Art Theatre, but it shows forcefully how fundamental all Russian theatre people consider Stanislavski’s training methods to be. I should say that everyone in the Moscow theatre world has a knowledge of the essentials of that system even though he may devote all his day to a refutation of them.
4
I have left Tovarishch Furminova sitting behind her flat- topped desk for a most discourteous length of time. It is high time we returned.
Every book about the Soviet Union must contain a few statistics and since Furminova furnished me with the only interesting ones relating to my field, I feel that this is the appropriate spot to unburden myself of them, although by the time the reader gets to them, the statistics will undoubtedly be no longer applicable! It seems, according to Furminova, who was one of a Commission appointed by Narkompros to assemble the figures, that before the Revolution in all of Russia there were 250 theatres; now there are 5 60 . Before the Revolution there were a paltry 8,000 actors, 1,000 of whom were chronically unemployed; now there are nearly 25,000, none of whom are unemployed. There are, in addition to the 25,000 actors, 1,500 regis- seurs to direct them, and 5,000 other theatre specialists— managers, directors, literary advisers, etc., to assist, supervise and interpret them.
Furminova offers us other statistics more directly concerned with the subject of this chapter. There are now throughout the Union 4,687 clubs which are either dramatic or have theatre groups active within them. These include the clubs in factories and collective farms which I
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have previously described. There are now 168 theatrical schools, whereas before 1917 there were but 30 in the whole country. Today these 168 schools are teaching 26,000 students.
St. John Ervine, in his review of Markov’s recently published book, The Soviet Theatre, condemned the author harshly for his emphasis on statistics, particularly concerning the number of playhouses newly built or about to be built throughout the Union. He announced very positively that we must not forget that quantity does not mean quality, and in this I heartily concur. The Bolsheviks, like the Americans whom they admire, are very apt to place too much faith in figures; at the same time Mr. Ervine’s native theatre has neither quantity nor quality of actors and artists comparable to the Soviet, a statement which I trust he will not try to refute until he can speak from personal observation.
The demand-exceeding-the-supply situation exists not only in Moscow but throughout the Soviet Union. If anything, there is a greater demand for actors, for theatres, in the provinces than in the already well-supplied capital. The entire country, made familiar with the dramatic supremacy of Moscow through years of hearing of it, looks to that city to furnish it with its artistic mentors. It is to supply this demand that the Central Theatre Combinate is chiefly concerned. Its Technicum is unique among the 168 dramatic schools in that it is the only one which does not prepare individual actors only, but is devoted to the preparation of a whole collective theatre. Its Technicum prepares the company, its Institute trains its commanding or leading staff. To make clear the difference between them, I shall consider them separately, the Technicum, being the more elementary school, first.
As the Combinate has for its aim the supplying of theatres to the country, so it goes to the country for the
material out of which to organize them. The majority of its students come from outside Moscow. Each year a traveling staff of twenty makes a huge tour of the U.S.S.R., visiting the clubs and factory circles of the provinces. They even penetrate into remote parts of northern Siberia and central Asia. Wherever talent appears to them, they bring it back to Moscow. In 1934 there were 2,000 applicants for the Technicum’s three sections: drama, music- drama, and theatres for the national minorities. Into the first section sixty were accepted, into the second thirty; the national minorities came as groups, there being now four of them. The choice from among the applicants is made on the basis of an examination which they undergo when they get to Moscow; the unsuccessful ones are sent back to their provinces, the successful ones are given dormitory rooms, provisions are made for their food, and a small stipend, varying with the individual’s ability, is given. For all this Narkompros pays and it is now supporting five hundred students in the Technicum.
The students of the drama section are divided into groups, the nuclei of future collective theatres. These groups retain their identity throughout the four-year course. They are trained collectively and they go out together to form a theatre. There are about thirty young men and women in each group. This creation of a whole theatre seems to me one of the most interesting of the many experiments in collectivization in the U.S.S.R. It is also exceedingly valuable from the standpoint of preserving, for the rest of the Union and for the future, the Russian tradition of the perfectly integrated acting ensemble in the theatre.
Perhaps the quickest way to outline the curriculum of the Technicum would be to present in the following table form the courses required during the four years. There are no electives. By an examination of the number of hours
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devoted to each and the place in the four years where the work comes, you can see for yourself the way in which the young actor’s training develops and where the emphases
Hours | Hours | Hours | Hours | |
Course First Yr. | Second Yr. | Third Yr. | Fojirth Yr | |
History . | 130 | |||
History of Communist | ||||
Party. | 60 | |||
Political Economy. . . . | 60 | |||
Economic Politics .... | 60 | 40 | ||
Dialectic Materialism. . | 90 | 70 | ||
Russian Language .... | 90 | |||
Russian Literature | ||||
(19th century) . . . | 90 | |||
Literature . | 90 | |||
Military Affairs . | 45 | 70 | ||
Psychology . | 70 | |||
History of ancient | ||||
theatre . | 90 | |||
History of modern | ||||
theatre . | 90 | 90 | ||
History of Art. | 50 | |||
History of Literature. . | 40 | |||
Gymnastics. | 6 S | |||
Rhythmics . | 90 | 90 | ||
Dancing . | 90 | 90 | 65 | 80 |
Physical Culture. | 45 | 45 | ||
Acrobatics . | 45 | 45 | ||
Fencing. | 90 | |||
Diction . | 180 | 165 | 135 | 40 |
Mastery of Acting. . . . | 390 | 410 | 590 | 850 |
Music Appreciation. . . | 90 | 90 | 70 | |
Make-up . | 90 | 60 | ||
Playwriting. | 90 | |||
Directing . | 90 | |||
Stagecraft . | 90 |
44
MOSCOW REHEARSALS
The most important course is obviously, and quite naturally, the Mastery of Acting. It is in this key course that the group asserts its unity. An instructor is chosen for the group from one of the important theatres—an actor, for in the Technicum prominent actors teach actors, regisseurs teach regisseurs. Most of the instructors come from the Moscow Art Theatre, for since the Stanislavski system is the basis of all teaching of acting here, it seems wise to have the teaching come directly out of his own theatre. There are, however, instructors from the Meier- hold Theatre and from the Kamerny Theatre as well. The instructor who takes over the group teaches it, in any case, the principles of his own theatre, whichever it be, for the four years. This gives the group artistic cohesion and a common style which, after four years’ study, it has come to understand. The first years are the significant ones, for that is the formative period. Most of the students have arrived young and fairly inexperienced, at least unformed in style. (They are eligible from the age of sixteen.) After the grounding in the system which will characterize the group, the students study as part of the Mastery of Acting course in their fourth year ''modern theatrical trends.” This study gives them a knowledge of other systems of acting than the one which they are making their own. It broadens them but does not really affect their previous three years’ preparation.
I remember particularly, from among classes which I attended, one in Mastery of Acting. It was my first visit and when I arrived the work was already in progress. The instructor was a young actor of the Art Theatre, but at the moment he did not appear to be instructing. In fact the entire room was in silence. It was a lesson in pantomime. One after another the students rose, performed the complicated piece of pantomime through which each tried to tell a story. When the pantomime was over the student
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explained the story and the instructor pointed out at what points it failed to carry to its audience. When the class was dismissed, a dozen or so of them came to my corner to have a talk with their American visitor. We were all about the same age and they were as interested in my reactions as I was in theirs. Adroitly they became the interviewers instead of the interviewed, and the young Soviet Russians have a way of asking direct and often embarrassing questions. Which Moscow theatre did I like best? Were American designers better than Russian designers? What system of acting was practiced most widely in America? What did Americans think of the Russian theatre? Who paid for the cost of production in American theatres?
The music-drama department of the Technicum is divided into four groups. These groups are not collectives like the drama sections, for to send out a complete opera theatre would require ballet and orchestra as well, and the Technicum is not prepared to train them. In music-drama work the methods of the Stanislavski and Nemirovich- Danchenko Musical Studios are being followed. In fact, a number of the members of those Studios are trained here. An examination of their curriculum reveals that the Mastery of Acting courses occupy the largest number of hours in the first two years but are not taught thereafter. Among the background courses, foreign languages appear—a noticeable omission from the preparation of drama students. The courses pertaining to music naturally predominate, although potential prima donnas are required to study physical culture, dancing and make-up as well.
The department devoted to the creation of theatres to send to the national minorities is an exceedingly interesting one. With more than half of its territory lying in Asia, the U.S.S.R. contains within its boundaries many peoples whose civilizations and cultures are both picturesque and backward. Recognizing the value which the theatre has
been to it in propagandizing European Russia, tbe Communist Party wishes to utilize it to carry its message to the faraway reaches of the land. Above and beyond that purpose, which is for the Communists a utilitarian one, there is a desire to build up for its own sake whatever artistic form exists in the primitive dances and dramas which these people have and also to bring to them some Western culture.
There are four groups which have come from these minorities to the Central Theatre Combinate. There are the Ossetians who come from a remote part of the Caucasus, the Yakuts from the extreme northern part of Siberia, the Kazaks who inhabit the part of central Asia which includes Turkestan, and the Kara-Kalpaks from the southern part of'Central Asia. Each of these groups has its own language, and it is in that language that most of its work is carried on, although all these minority groups in the Technicum are learning Russian.
I shall always remember a class of Yakuts which I visited. From their home well within the Arctic Circle, it takes them two months of traveling to reach Moscow. When their summer vacation arrives, they have just time to get home, spend three days with their people and start back again! They were dressed in that pathetic approximation of western clothing which ill becomes so many of the Bolsheviks and ill fits all of them* Their faces were strongly Mongoloid, there was an Eskimo quality about their appearance which shirt and trousers or cotton dress could not eradicate. They were rehearsing in their own Yakutian language a translation of Moliere’s "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme ,, I To see these tiny black-haired yellow-skinned young men trying to assume the airs and manners of the French seventeenth century was amusing and a little touching. They worked very hard and they showed a nice sense of humor. The rest of the class who
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looked on while the half-dozen performers went through their scene was very eager and enthusiastic. They were all obviously anxious that I should like it too. I did.
In the State Theatre Institute which forms the other half of the Combinate are one hundred and twenty students between the ages of eighteen and thirty or thirty- five. There are four departments in the Institute. The first is devoted to the training of regisseurs 1 for drama and opera. The second is for scholars and scientific specialists in the history of the theatre. The third is confined to the preparation of managers of art sections. The fourth trains young people to become the managing directors of theatres.
Seventy per cent of the first course for the training of regisseurs is Mastership of Acting. Without exception every person in Russia with whom I talked about directing plays stated it as his belief that a regisseur could direct capably only when he knew as much about the art of acting as could be learned from being an actor himself. How different this is from the situation in New York where directors have served apprenticeship as either playwrights, stage managers, designers, or at schools where in courses on the "art of directing” they have only read about actors. In Moscow the great directors frequently—some of them regularly—appear with their companies, they perform side by side with them. When, if ever, has New York seen Guthrie McClintic, Philip Moeller, Gilbert Miller, Rouben Mamoulian, Elmer Rice, Robert Edmond Jones, Norman- Bel Geddes, Worthington Miner, any of our better-known directors, appear on their own stages? I do not say that they should, any more than I say that Stanislavski and the
1 Clarification of terminology seems necessary before proceeding further. Throughout this study I use the word "regisseur” as synonymous with the American director of a play. The foreign Theatre Director, as referred to later in this paragraph, is the equivalent of what would be an American super - theatre manager.
other Russians should not. I merely wish to emphasize this difference in the point of departure in direction.
This attitude toward directing explains why the Institute requires its students of directing to learn as much about the mastery of acting as it requires its students of acting to learn. In this first course a play is taken up and everyone works on it as actors and regisseurs. In the second and third years a certain amount of time is spent in observation of production methods at the better theatres in Moscow. At Vakhtangov Theatre rehearsals I used regularly to meet a boy and a girl from the Theatre Institute who were watching rehearsals, and at the rehearsals of Gorki’s "Enemies” at the Moscow Art Theatre, two young men from the Institute were present, like myself, to study directors’ methods. They were, in fact, supposed to understudy a small part apiece, and to play it in rehearsal when the regular member of the cast was absent.
In the vacation interval between the second and third years, the students of the regisseur course work as assistant regisseurs for four months. During their fourth year they are sent out to the place where after graduation they will be working. Here they do a production on their own, which is reviewed by a Commission, and at the end of the year they come back to Moscow to take state examinations which will qualify them to become practicing regisseurs.
Of the other courses offered at the Institute, the most interesting and significant is, in my opinion, the course for directors of theatres. It is an altogether unique and remarkable work. The director of a state theatre in any city in the Soviet Union is in a position of responsibility and prominence in that community which is appropriate to the dignity of the position of the theatre in the Russian Bolshevist society. The person to occupy this post must be one familiar with the cultural background of everything connected with the theatre. He must come out of the pro-
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letariat, since there are nothing but proletarians to choose from. But there are few of them at this time in Russia already possessed of the breadth of culture as well as the specialized capabilities necessary, so the Soviet Union must create its cultural leaders out of whole cloth. That is what this particular course in the Theatre Combinate is trying to do.
There are thirty young men and women preparing themselves to become theatre directors; they are among the older students in the Institute. They study the history of the theatre, of the fine arts, music, applied art, scenic design, stage direction, and something which is called the "planning of theatrical economy” which was defined to me as "the art of being able to organize a theatre.” One phase of it includes a knowledge of bookkeeping.
I know of no dramatic school, academy or institute anywhere which can match the scale on which the Central Theatre Combinate is contributing to the world of the theatre. There are many edifices in the U.S.S.R. which are called by the elegant and very Soviet title of "Palace of Culture.” There are few which have such right to the title as does, in its own way, the old merchant prince’s mansion on the quiet side street of Moscow.
Before closing this section on theatre preparation directly administered by Narkompros , I feel that I should make brief mention of one other project, not yet accomplished but nobly conceived. I heard of it first when, the week before leaving Moscow, I went to pay my final respects to the First Teacher of the Soviet theatre—Stanislavski. It is his own project. He has offered his services to the government to found special courses for regisseurs who will work directly and personally with him for six months and then start two studios for drama and for opera which will continue thereafter under his general super-
vision as long as he shall live. The plans had not yet been worked out when I left Moscow in February, 1935, and the project may never materialize, but it was a gracious and generous offer from one who is neither young nor strong, and what Stanislavski offers no one in Moscow would be apt to refuse.
CHAPTER
THREE